Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme - Update - 23rd April

We wanted to update you on a couple of developments in relation to Furlough claims and also the effect furlough will have on employees’ holiday entitlement.

Furlough Claims

As I am sure you are all aware from the 20th of April you have been able to start making claims to HMRC for the reimbursement of the 80% furlough pay.

If we prepare your payroll we will be submitting these claims for you (if we haven’t already) and will continue to do so throughout the time furlough is in place by the government.

We will be sending you an approval email to check the information, please keep an eye out for these and get back to us as soon as possible to avoid any unnecessary delay in the claims being submitted.

If we haven’t contacted you please bear with us we are working through all the furlough claims and have 8 staff working flat out on this.

Also although this is a significant amount of additional work for us, we have made the decision that we will not be invoicing for the furlough claims. We understand you need our support more than ever and the last thing you require are additional costs at this difficult time.

Holiday

Following on from our blog on the 20th April regarding an update on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, we have now received further clarification on the treatment of holiday pay.

Contrary to the advice given in the blog on the 20th, we have now been told that if an employee takes holiday in the furlough period you will be able to claim for 80% of this through the furlough scheme. Therefore if someone takes holiday during the furlough period this will just cost you the 20% not covered by the scheme.

One point clients have been concerned about is the fact that employees are going to possibly have a significant amount of holiday to take once lock down has been lifted.

One consideration would be to ask employees if they would be happy to take holiday in the furlough period. This would be beneficial to both you and them as;

They would have their pay made up to the 100% which they may appreciate in these difficult times.

When you do need the employees back they won’t have all this holiday to take and will be available when you need them.

You will only have to fund 20% of the holiday pay as opposed to the 100% once the furlough period has ended.

If they don’t accept the above then you can force an employee to take holiday but you need to give them twice as much notice as the time being taken off. So for example, if you ask them to take 2 days holiday, you would need to give them 4 days’ notice.

I hope you found the above helpful and if you have any queries please do not hesitate to get in touch.